Corpses waste away at Hill Country ‘farm'

Corpses helping advance science of ID'ing remains.

By Roy Bragg :
January 3, 2012
: Updated: January 4, 2012 12:15am

Dr. Jeff Tomberlin places a wire cage over the carcass of a pig at the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in San Marcos.

Photo By Darren Abate/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

Dr. Aaron Tarone, right, and Dr. Jeff Tomberlin, remove a gas collection chamber from atop a pig carcass, Saturday, Nov. 5, 2011, at the Texas State University Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in San Marcos. The chamber allows researchers to collect and analyze gases escaping from the decomposing carcass.

Photo By Darren Abate/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

Dr. Jeff Tomberlin removes flying insects from a cadaver enclosure, Saturday, Nov. 5, 2011, at the Texas State University Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in San Marcos.

SAN MARCOS — A rotting corpse could be seen in a clearing between mesquite stands.

A metal cage had been placed over the body. The bars were wide enough to allow insects and the elements in but keep large feral animals out.

Another body lay a few dozen feet away. A third rested on the far side of a dirt road.

A total of seven bodies dotted the landscape of Texas State University's Freeman Ranch. Then there were the shallow graves here and there, each containing another body in various states of decay.

It seems like a field of nightmares, but it's really the bread and butter of a groundbreaking research facility.

The Forensic Anthropology Lab is one of a handful of institutions that study human decomposition. The idea is to reverse-engineer the identification process.

“It's a really new field of study,” said Daniel Wescott, the lab's executive director. “We know hardly anything about it. A lot of what we're doing here is baseline research. This the beginning stage of studying decomposition that occurs in Texas.”

For years, investigators have relied on seat-of-the-pants science and good luck when identifying bodies. The big breakthrough came in 1982, when the University of Tennessee opened the first lab. Now there's one in North Carolina and, most recently, a lab opened in East Texas by Sam Houston State University.

The need for a Texas lab, Wescott says, is that Texas weather is different. The drier air and different set of varmints changes the conditions under which Texas victims are found.

Donated bodies are sent to what some call the “body farm” from around the nation, Wescott says, and are matched up with researchers from around the country who come here to learn what happens to a body under certain conditions.

A Texas A&M University team, for example, had two bodies near the high steel gates of the 26-acre study area in late fall. A man's body, which still sported a full head of gray hair, was situated under a mesh net. Nearby were the remains of a woman sans net.

Aaron Tarone and Jeff Tomberlin were part of an Aggie research team studying how flies might impact the microbial process of decomposition.

“There's unique stuff that you can do here,” Tarone said, “that you can't do anywhere else.”

The lab work requires capturing different readings and samples at different times, Tomberlin says. Sometimes, that means putting a solid metal cover over one of the bodies to capture the gas that results from decay. A sample of that gas is gathered and studied back at A&M.

The ultimate goal of decomposition studies, Wescott said, is to be able to identify bodies more accurately and more quickly.

“Trying to get dates and times for bodies found in the woods or buried or underwater is difficult. You guess if you don't have any scientific basis evaluation. These labs developed as a way to get evidence-based, scientific information about what happens to a body.”

And the bigger payoff, a Florida researcher says, might be after the field studies are done.

Forensic anthropology, she says, has been hampered by a low supply of skeletal remains to study. Most modern research has been on a small set of remains, some centuries old, that are stored in various museums.

“What's been lacking in our field are modern collections,” she says. “This will allow us to test our methods on bones for which we know the medical history and the age. That's a big difference.”